I did a presentation at my children’s school today on this terrific piece of software called Celestia. The software is free and provides a complete simulation of the solar system and in fact the entire known universe. You jump aboard your virtual space ship and can literally fly anywhere! It gives you some astounding views and a REAL sense of just how BIG the universe is. Very cool. i highly recommend it. It may not run on every computer, it does require some horsepower and decent video card, but its free, so download it and try it out!

I gave the kids a bunch of web links and as promised, here they are:

Astronomy Web Sites:

Celestia

The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

You can just download the free version of Celestia and start to explore, but I HIGHLY recommend Frank Gregorio’s excellent educational resources. Basically the presentation I did today was one of his lessons. Whether you are teaching an astronomy class, or just prefer a self-guided tour, you can’t go wrong with these resources. You can download them individually or purchase a CD from Frank at nominal cost which installs everything you need.

Amazing free interactive model of the earth with high quality aerial satellite photography, 3D buildings, the sky, the oceans and more.If you haven’t heard of Google Earth, really, where have you been?

This tool lets you plug in the desired size of the Sun, and it tells you how big and how far apart everything else needs to be. Neat. In the session, I showed the kids a schematic based on this tool of creating a Solar System model at St. Linus. The long dimension of the St. Linus campus is 1,300 ft (from 103rd to 105th). If we place the Sun at the corner of 105th and Lawler, the Sun would be about the size of a softball (3 1/2″ in diameter) and Pluto (yes I know it is no longer a planet, but I still like to include it – poor Pluto) be the size of the haed of a pin and would be right at the corner of 103rd and Lawler. WOW!

Forgot to show this one to the class, but it has always been a cool one. I think it was Charles Eames in the 60’s that did a movie on this concept. This website has lots of items devoted to the idea. Amazing how similar things at the micro and macro scale start to look… Hmmm, divine design?